Beautifully shot Thai horror film about a Chinese immigrant (Zee-Oui) who becomes a murderer of children. If it had maintained focus on the killer's fascinating journey, it would have been a great film. Unfortunately, it adds a superficial, unrealistic subplot involving a beautiful journalist with her own memories of an abducted sister. As a result, it's a very good film with some bad TV movie dramatics.
Directors Buranee Rachjaibun and Nida Suthat Na Ayutthaya, who come from a background in commercials, paint a sympathetic portrait of Zee-Oui, a shy man whose weak physical stature and poor health invited much harassment and derision from others. Physically abused, cursed with terminal tuberculosis, and plagued by memories of being forced to eat human flesh during a tour of duty in WW2, Zee-Oui finally snaps and leaves a trail of bodies across rural Thailand.
Long Duan is totally believable as Zee-Oui. A sequence in which he stalks potential victims at a carnival is visually powerful and creepy in the extreme, recreating the mood of Lang's "M". In the film's most striking scene, he carries a struggling victim across a bridge and stabs her beneath it as a train roars overhead. The combination of sound, lighting and composition is extraordinary.
Taking a cue from John McNaughton's "Henry - Portrait of A Serial Killer", the directors depict only the grisly aftermath of most of the murders. There is one reasonably graphic stabbing scene and another depicting the cooking of organs, but the violence never reaches the level of Herman Yau's "The Untold Story" and the darkness on parade is never as pitch black as that found in Augustin Villaronga's "In A Glass Cage".
It is so sad to see a potential classic undone by stock additions that may have been put there to give the work broader appeal. With this film's inflammatory subject matter, that was never going to happen, anyway.
There has been some misguided criticism of the filmmakers' sympathetic portrayal of a child killer. No matter how you want to cut it or how passionately you want to deny it, Zee-Oui was a fellow human being who lost his moral compass and expressed his confusion and inner chaos violently. The film does not excuse the crimes of its central character; it simply tries to explain how one person went off the rails.
It is a very worthy achievement.
Directors Buranee Rachjaibun and Nida Suthat Na Ayutthaya, who come from a background in commercials, paint a sympathetic portrait of Zee-Oui, a shy man whose weak physical stature and poor health invited much harassment and derision from others. Physically abused, cursed with terminal tuberculosis, and plagued by memories of being forced to eat human flesh during a tour of duty in WW2, Zee-Oui finally snaps and leaves a trail of bodies across rural Thailand.
Long Duan is totally believable as Zee-Oui. A sequence in which he stalks potential victims at a carnival is visually powerful and creepy in the extreme, recreating the mood of Lang's "M". In the film's most striking scene, he carries a struggling victim across a bridge and stabs her beneath it as a train roars overhead. The combination of sound, lighting and composition is extraordinary.
Taking a cue from John McNaughton's "Henry - Portrait of A Serial Killer", the directors depict only the grisly aftermath of most of the murders. There is one reasonably graphic stabbing scene and another depicting the cooking of organs, but the violence never reaches the level of Herman Yau's "The Untold Story" and the darkness on parade is never as pitch black as that found in Augustin Villaronga's "In A Glass Cage".
It is so sad to see a potential classic undone by stock additions that may have been put there to give the work broader appeal. With this film's inflammatory subject matter, that was never going to happen, anyway.
There has been some misguided criticism of the filmmakers' sympathetic portrayal of a child killer. No matter how you want to cut it or how passionately you want to deny it, Zee-Oui was a fellow human being who lost his moral compass and expressed his confusion and inner chaos violently. The film does not excuse the crimes of its central character; it simply tries to explain how one person went off the rails.
It is a very worthy achievement.